Peek

» see getpeek.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

the first time i heard of the peek was in a gizmodo gift-guide roundup around late 2008. a cheap orange handheld that only did email. it read as a cute american anomaly. i had no way of buying one from ankara and my nokia already handled sms which was the local equivalent conversation medium anyway.

amol sarva co-founded peek in new york in 2007 with rob gray and john tantum, two other virgin mobile usa alumni from the early 2000s. the pitch was strong on constraint: a pocket device with a keyboard and a screen and nothing on it except email. the original hardware shipped in september 2008 for 99 dollars with a 20-dollar-a-month unlimited email plan on at&t. time magazine put it on the fifty-best-inventions list that year and wired named it the top gadget of 2008.

the peek pronto followed in april 2009 with faster push and outlook exchange support for small businesses. the twitterpeek shipped in november 2009 for people who wanted a device that only did twitter, which reads today like a satire but was a real product at 100 dollars. the peek 9 followed in 2010 with a color screen. the whole family topped out somewhere under a hundred thousand active subscribers.

by early 2011 the iphone had two full generations under its belt, android was surging on the entry-level tier and the case for a single-purpose email pager was collapsing. sarva pivoted peek to a software play called the peek genius cloud, aimed at making cheap feature phones smarter through a hosted backend. the hardware program went into wind-down. on 1 february 2012 sarva sent a note to remaining device owners: the peek network was shutting off the next day. lifetime-subscription customers who had paid 200 dollars up front were among the ones losing service.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the single-purpose bet ~

peek was arguing something interesting for a moment. that the phone did too much, that email deserved a dedicated device the way the kindle was a dedicated device for reading. that argument had a real 18 to 24 month window when smartphones were still expensive and their data plans hurt. by 2010 the window had closed. cheap android was arriving and the constraint pitch stopped making sense to any consumer who was not already carrying a corporate blackberry.

~ what shutting off the network meant ~

the peek device had no local email store worth speaking of. all the pull-parse-relay logic ran on the peek servers. when the network went dark the hardware was fully bricked, no offline mode, no fallback. lifetime subscribers got a form email from sarva citing changing network standards and low remaining device counts. some of the hardware went to hackers on ebay who wanted to hack linux onto the box. most of it went in a drawer.

~ what happened after ~

sarva went on to found knotel, a flexible-office startup in the wework category, which itself went into chapter 11 in early 2021. rob gray moved into general startup advising. the peek office in downtown manhattan closed around the time the network did. the physical devices still turn up on ebay and in gadget-blog retrospectives as a curio from the exact half-decade when it was still possible to sell a computer that only did one thing.

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